Dear Anatomy of a Librarian – You forgot kicking ass and being awesome.

I always find these kinds of graphics interesting. Usually though, its because I’m interested in their design instead of the information. In this case, I think that this graphic brings to mind more questions than it answers but it’s still pretty.

Anatomy Of a Librarian
Anatomy Of a Librarian

1) The average librarian makes 60+ a year? I’m now wondering how they came up with that average. Obviously, they are taking full careers into consideration and not just the entry level positions. In which case, I wonder how many years an average librarian has to work to reach the average pay? And that makes me wonder, what is the average career span of a librarian? By this, do they mean only those working as a librarian or are they considering library manager, directors, and other higher management as well?

2) The highest largest amount of librarians are between 24 and 54? Are you freaking kidding me? So the average librarian is aged somewhere in the average age range for a person who has professional level career before retirement? I would be far more interested if this was broken down into at least 5 year increments since you need an MLIS to be a librarian and so few people get post graduate degrees before 24 anyway. People also begin to retire after 54 so this 30 year age range makes this data completely uninteresting. Basically they are saying that people in the average working age range have jobs.

3) The left and right brain stuff is kinda interesting, but what is more interesting is what the crap is written in all those little subsections of this girl’s cranium? I mean, there could be anything in there! I think, at least its my guess, that this is where the how to clean the toilet, dealing with unruly patrons watching porn, and changing lightbulbs is listed in the graphic because I don’t see that anywhere else. The big stuff on the outside is everything I thought librarianship was going to be, and the I’m guessing the stuff on the inside is all the other stuff nobody tells you about.

4) The where they work part is actually interesting, I liked this part.

5) Brief history? No kidding… Franklin to Dewey? What about Carnegie!? This crap is only 150 years long and at its most recent it’s 130 years out of date!! Libraries have been around since 350 BC and this is the crap they decided to show? WTF?

6/7) Gender and recreational activities are also fairly uninteresting because it’s exactly what you would expect. But I want to add a section. I think that overall, librarians most significant recreational activity is kicking ass and being awesome! So where is that catagory?


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Partnerships = Library Awesome!

I’ve been thinking about some of our libraries most successful programs and services that we offer. I realized that almost all of the most successful ones have come from partnerships that have been cultivated by the staff. These partnerships have led to larger program numbers, a wider array of programs, and increased services and collections. Even more importantly, we are being offered money and resources to provide some things that we wouldn’t have been able to provide before. The following list are some of the partnerships we have at EPA Library.

Literacy Fair
East Palo Alto is holding its first ever Literacy Fair called Reading Rainbow in the Park. This came about through a partnership with the Stanford Alumni Association. We were contacted by a liaison from this group who had the idea for a fair and came to us for help. We are providing many of the books and giveaways as well as some of the entertainment and they are providing the organizing of the event itself.

Health and Wellness Programs
We have a local community health organization that provides a lot of the medical services in the area and we offer them a space for community outreach and education about health issues. They especially do many programs for our seniors. My librarians work with this organization to bring those presentations to our library.

Guitar Lending Library
This partnership isn’t complete yet, but it bears mentioning. I received a grant to circulate guitars at the library and one of my librarians brought in a band called the Vintage Music Collective to perform. One of the members of this group teaches music lessons in EPA through their non-profit called Live in Peace and we will be providing the guitars while he provides the lessons.

Catered Events
One of my librarians works closely with an organization called Jobtrain that provides vocational training in the Culinary Arts. The community members who are involved in this program need somewhere to showcase their culinary skills and talents and we have events where food is always welcome. So, these students “get to” provide food and food services to some of our larger events.

Seed Library
This is one of the few ones that I was the one who approached a local organization for. Our Library offers a seed library to the public that was modeled after the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library. When I heard about the library in Richmond I looked around in our community and found the local gardening non-profit called Collective Roots that runs the Farmer’s Market. When I told them about the seed library they jumped at the chance and we now offer seeds for “check-out” from our library. We also have plans to expand to tools for gardening and they provide gardening programs from our library.

Poet Library
An organization called School After School for Successful Youth (SASSY) is an offshoot of the jobtrain organization. The students in this program create a large amount of art, literature, and poetry and they need a space to display their work within the community. We are simply giving them a wall to display the work of the community members. Eventually, (they don’t know this yet) I want to expand this partnership to bound and cataloged materials for circulation. Sort of, a local authors collection, but published and provided only by the library. I did something similar when I was an elementary school librarian and I think it would work well with this kind of partnership.

East Palo Alto History Project
We are working with Stanford students to create a history of EPA mural across the back wall of the library. This mural will show the history of East Palo Alto through the eyes of the library as it has moved and changed over the last 75 years. The movement and changes that occurred in the library parallel a lot of what has happened here and is very reflective of the changes in the community.

We have many more, but those are the ones that I am most excited about. Basically, I’ve figured out my job in this community is to find ways to say yes to as many things as I can then figure out how to make it work. While I might say “not yet,” I almost never say no to a community member unless the service they want to provide lies outside the scope of librarianship or community building.

What I want to know is-
1) What partnerships are you building in your community?
2) What would you say no to?
3) What are some of your dream partnerships?



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The #Partyhard Post: How Partying Can Make Libraries Better

This post stems entirely from @librarianjp and our conversations on FB and his youtube video. From what I understand, he got inspired by Andrew W.K. so I’m researching that guy too. Anyway, I wanted to give him credit for getting me to think about this in a more creative way. Here it is…

Librarians need to party more and party harder. Now I know what you’re thinking! Yes, I have been to ALA and I know that librarians do party pretty well, but my thoughts go beyond this and I can only explain them from some of the things that have happened in my experiences with partying with librarians and what I think can come from librarians embracing some aspects of the #partyhard community.

A Celebration of our Profession
One of the first things that JP said to me about the profession of librarianship and the whole party hard theory was to the effect of needing to celebrate our profession more instead of mourning it. This really hit home for me at the time it was said because I was just reading about layoffs, libraries closing, hours lost, budgets cut, etc… I really feel like there are quite a few people who are quietly mourning the loss of this profession. But there’s no reason that we need to go out quietly. If we do really wind up going out, we should go out loud, kicking, screaming, and celebrating everything that libraries have done for the people of this country for the last 236 years. Really, our fellow librarians have accomplished a whole lot when you sit back and think about it! So now let’s celebrate it!

This leads me to something I despise but I will name it here. It’s a book called “The Secret.” Let me state that I HATE this book for a number of reasons. *But really, the power of the theory behind the book is the power of positive thinking. By believing that what you want can be accomplished you can accomplish it.* So, as a profession we need to begin this cycle of believing we can accomplish everything we need to. I don’t think that this can start from the position of negativity or self-doubt that I keep seeing and hearing but needs to begin from a position of positive actions. What better way to begin this cycle than through a party and celebration of our profession?

Party With Each Other
This is a conversation that I have had many times. In fact, I said something similar here in Loida’s video. The summary is that I’m always a little weary of going to sessions and workshops at conferences. This is generally because these were put together up to a year or more in advance. The people I’m interested in hearing from all write about what they’re excited about online and whatever it is that they’re presenting on was talked about on their blogs, twitter, youtube, etc… when they first thought of it. I almost never learn anything new from sessions. I do, however, learn incredible amounts at the socials and meet-ups. The people I’m excited to learn from are talking directly with me and telling me about what they are working on and excited about right now. I get to ask questions and get feedback on what I’m excited about on a personal level. People say what they wouldn’t or couldn’t say at a workshop and there is a significant barrier that is broken down in the social scene. The end product of this is that I have never learned more than when I partied with the people who I am a geeky fan of.

My other problem was brought up by Andy Woodworth and I fairly snarkly answered that the problem could be solved if we partied more. The problem was that library systems don’t collaborate enough. I think that a large part of the lack of collaboration and sharing between library entities is that many of the people involved in those organizations never meet. So, to help with this, Andrew Carlos and I started some Librarian meet-ups in the Bay area. We have only had two and I’ve only been to one, but at just this one meet-up I found out about a project happening in my neighboring library system that is only about a mile away that would allow for some kind of partnership with a project that I’m working on. If we hadn’t partied together, we wouldn’t have had this opportunity to learn from each other and see what we are each doing. Now, I have new collaborative project for Fall, I know what other libraries in my area are doing, how we can collaborate, and I know new people to plan exciting new services and programs with.

Party with our Patrons and Our Community
This was a completely random and recent thought that I had in the ALA Think Tank group. I have not really tested or tried this so I’ll just throw it in here at the end in case anyone is still reading.

What if we partied with our patrons? What if we just went to the bars in our communities and hung out all night, danced, drank, and really got to know our patrons in ways that we don’t get to know them at the reference desk? What could we learn about their real needs and wants? What would they tell us in a social setting at a bar or restaurant or concert that they wouldn’t tell us in the library? What do you think?

I guess I should say that at some level I have actually done this but not exactly in the way that I was thinking. While I haven’t really tried to make connections by partying in my community, I have partied in my community and I have made some connections. The first was that I was introduced to someone who already knew about my Guitar Project and had been following it because he wanted his organization to donate money to it! He actually knew me before I ever met him! (I was famous in my own mind for like 10 seconds) and the second was that I found out about a local chapter of the group called Guitars not Guns and they also want to help with the guitar project. But again, I wasn’t looking for connections as I’m proposing here, just out for the night. What if I was actually looking to meet folks?

*that summary just saved you $14.00 on Amazon so buy someone a drink.



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The Revolution Won’t be Televised but it Will be Facebooked.

The ALA Think Tank grew from a group that was originally conceived at the ALA Annual conference in Washington DC as a way to save money on conferences. The original 13 members were made up of young librarians and leaders who had an interest in doing more for the profession and getting more out of the conference. From this, we realized that we cou…ld take advantage of the shared experiences and knowledge of the group and gain even more from the conference. We began brainstorming ways to improve conferences for younger professionals, find ways that ALA can work to better support new young leaders in the profession, and generally advocate for the next generation of librarianship.

We realized that what was stopping many young professionals from becoming more involved in ALA and other organizations was that the organization is increasingly unresponsive to change. We continuously hear that many librarians are not involved in the organization because “it does nothing for them.” It is our opinion that the organization has itself been institutionalized in such a way that it is suffering from a kind of analysis paralysis and unable to move forward and really achieve what needs to be done for new professionals and to be responsive to the changes that are occuring librarianship.

The ALA Think Tank operates outside of the restrictions of the ALA and is not bound by the institutionalization of the organization. This allows young professionals the ability to self-create a better conference experience, to learn from each in a more meaningful way, and be the change that they feel they would like to see in the profession. Along the way, we hope that we can lead by example and show professional organizations what it is that its members want by doing those things.

This new group is a way to share and support new ideas from a wider group of people and as a way to enact a kind of guerilla change in our professional organizations. We encourage you all to share your experiences and ideas for change as well as finding ways to make that change happen. We want to work together to lead the change in ALA that needs to happen before more young and new professionals are discouraged by institutionalization of the org.

This group’s intent is to not be legitimized by ALA through any of the means that generally occur such as the establishment of round tables, interest groups, letters to the editor, or ALA resolutions, etc… Instead, by working outside of the rules of ALA to improve the organization by doing what it can’t we are going to have the freedom to be the change that must occur.

We also encourage you all to establish your own ALA Think Tanks within your state organizations if you feel that changes need to occur there.

Here is the Facebook Group for anyone interested.

#makeithappen
#partyhard


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Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions (and other thoughts on walking away)

I recently came across a job opening in an organization far outside of librarianship. It involved a lot of the things I was passionate about as a kid and am even more passionate about as an adult. This position was for a sailing non-profit organization that takes children out on the San Francisco bay to educate them about sailing, marine sciences, and more. For those of you who don’t know I love sailing, I love teaching, I love working with kids, and I am kind of a fanatic about oceanic conservation. Anyway, talking about my love for this job advertisement is not the point of this post. The point of this post is the following video…

What does this have to do with libraries you might ask? Well, I was thinking about, and have been thinking about budget cuts, checked-out librarians that refuse to retire, passionate and newer librarians who are dying to get the chance to do amazing work in libraries but can’t find job openings, ALA’s ludicrous and ineffectual institutionalization, ALA’s and state organization’s unwillingness to act as an advocate for librarianship, librarian’s unwillingness to fight for librarianship, library closures, library reductions in staff and money, libraries lack of ability (or refusal) to adapt to a changing information world, vendors that overcharge and under-deliver products and services that library patrons can’t or refuse to use, the hostile political environment of the people who claim that freedom isn’t free but someone else should pay for it, and all of the other systems in place that are working to keep libraries from getting ahead. So, my thought was… At what point do we become cool guys?

At what point to do we say forget all this, blow it all up, and walk away? Is it really worth it? There are many librarians who are having the same thoughts, Justin Hoenke also started questioning what is important, Tiffany Mair (who you should hire because she’s way better than me at everything) just had to apply for a job at Starbucks, and there many other amazing (typically younger and newer) librarians who have the passion and drive to fight for our profession but are questioning whether or not it’s all worth it. There are many days that I don’t think it is. There are many days that I want to blow it all up and walk away, but not today… Today, it’s worth it.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see what happens tomorrow.

*added info- Roy Tennant wrote an exactly right response to this. His advice is what is keeping many of us here. So if you’re reading this (although if you are, you’re probably coming here from his blog) and you’re feeling the same way, read his advice because it will keep you sane. If I didn’t have the crew of the Think Tank and some great Library Friends to keep me sane I would have quit or killed someone by now. Also, working for an amazing organization helps 🙂



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National Library Unconference Day (Will be EPIC!)com

So I’m not sure how many people know about this, but I hope that every librarian does. I’m talking about national library unconference day on May 22, 2012. This is your chance in you state, or region, or county, or library system, or just library, to hold your own unconference. What’s an unconference you ask? Well… I’ll let Allen McGinley and JP Porcaro explain it for me.

Personally, I love unconferences for a whole lot of reasons and there is talk of putting one together in my area (the San Francisco Bay Area) on the same day so I’m pretty stoked because some of the best experiences that I have had in librarianship have been at unconferences. For example, I met some amazing people, I gave my first professional “presentation,” I got the courage to talk to directors and high level administrators as equals, I learned about the programs and services being offered at other libraries, and I learned what kinds of ideas other professionals had about the state of librarianship and its future in the United States.

So this is our chance to have an excuse to #makeithappen in our locations. JP and Allen are basically calling for unconferences to happen all over the country on the same day. This will be a day of learning, sharing, and growing for anyone and everyone participating.

For even more information on the Unconference you can visit the 8bitlibrary website. If you’re a librarian and you’re not reading the 8bitlibrary blog, what are you doing on the internet?

The Great Librarian Write-Out!

It’s time for librarians to get out of the echo-chamber of librarianship and get some good words out to the people. So I’m proposing an award (my own personal money) of $250 for the best library-related article to be published in a non-library magazine or journal. Yes, that’s right… My own personal money!! That’s how important this is to me!

There are thousands of amazing writers in our profession who write their own blogs and write for our professional magazines and journals, but rarely (or never) do I see an article written for the public in a major national magazine about how libraries help society in some great way. I don’t think there has ever been a time when such articles should be appearing amidst the news of library closures, resource cutting, and layoffs. Its time that we got the word out about libraries to as many people as possible!!

It seems to me that there are hundreds of topics for articles that could be written that would be applicable to the content of a major magazine. Off of the top of my head I’m thinking

-Saving Businesses Money (or starting a business) with Library Resources
– Forbes
– Entrepreneur
– Fortune
-Business Week

-How someone learned about their cultural identity at the library
– Ebony
– Latina
– Out!

-Pet Care information
-Dogs
-Cats
-Bark!

But this is only scratching the surface of the possibilities. I could keep going but I think you get the idea. If you want to participate and win $250 for your article published in a non-library journal or magazine, here are the criteria;

-You must be in some way related to the library profession, a library vendor, a patron, a friend of a patron, or at least heard of the idea of libraries at one point in your life.

-It must be a pro-library article speaking positively about the benefits of libraries in some aspect of society and addressing the need for folks to get up and go to the library for some reason or another.

-The article must be printed between February 15 2011, and the first day of the ALA Midwinter Meeting on January 20th 2012

-It must be published in a non-library related magazine or journal with a national (United States) or international circulation. More points will be given to an article in a magazine with the largest circulation, and you will receive bonus points for a feature article.

-You must submit, your name, the title, and date of publication (for verification) by emailing us or commenting below.

The articles will be judged by the members of the Think Tank at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Dallas Texas in 2012. The winner will be announced January 24th 2012.

If you want to help us up the ante for prize money let us know by commenting below or sending us a message. Also, any money raised through our Café Press store will go towards added prizes and awards and other library advocacy projects as well so feel free to shop away! http://www.cafepress.com/libraryadvocate

Please be sure to sign up for the event on Facebook!!

*This event is brought to you by the members of the Think Tank.*
JP Porcarro
Allen McGinley
Jenn Walker
Tiffany Mair
Andrea Davis



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Punk-Ass Book Jockey
Librarians Against DRM
The Dark Ages Began With Closing A Library
..

Recap of a Week’s Worth of Awesome #library

This last week has been especially awesome in the world of libraries. If you were following along on Facebook or on Twitter then I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. For the three of you librarians who somehow missed this stuff… Here is a quick one-stop recap!

Old Spice Vs. New Spice

Andy Woodworth of the blog Agnostic Maybe and the Ben Jerry’s Librarian Flavored Ice Cream campaigns as well as the Save New Jersey Libraries Campaign (yeah he’s done all that) can now add getting this amazing video made for libraries by the Old Spice guy. I love this advertising idea! Just latch on to a meme and remind people to go to the library. I love it. Here’s the video;

Coming in with an equal level of rad (I think I need to use the word rad more often) is this video completely hanging on to the tails of the Old Spice ads.


In management news…

Here is a video about the surprising motivation of employees found tweeted by @annacreech. I have to say that I’m not completely surprised that it’s not…. Spoiler Alert… Money. After ALA in Washington at the Think Tank and spending time just having the freedom to be creative with some drinks and with uber smart librarians I can say that I was way more motivated by that experience than by money.


Guerilla Libraries

Now here is a concept I’m very excited about. These students, when faced with the closing of their library during critical time on campus (finals week), created their own library in a guerilla “Viva la resistance” kind of way. This is something that a few of us at the Think Tank have been thinking about for a while now. Guerilla Librarianship.


Non-Librarians blogging about libraries!

One of my favorite things to find online are blogs written by non-librarian folks who are either praising of condemning libraries. In this case, its praise and that just warms my heart. This is a family where two of the members (father and son) have Asperger’s Syndrom and spent the day playing chess at the library.